I recently came across another of history’s little-told stories; that of the female Samurai. I haven’t done extensive study of the Samurai culture and history but what little I have done has acquainted me with names like Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. A name I hadn’t come across before was Nakano Takeko. An hour long documentary entitled Samurai Warrior Queens on the Smithsonian channel introduced me to this fierce woman.

Nakano Takeko was born in Edo, a member of the Aizu domain and daughter of an Aizu official. Samurai women were trained in martial arts so they could protect the estates from bandits and Takeko began her training when she was six. She quickly showed aptitude, not only for the martial arts training but in scholarly pursuits as well. Her favorite stories were of Tomoe Gozen, a Samurai woman who’d fought and died 600 years before Takeko’s birth.

When Takeko was 16 her master, Daisuke, presented his nephew to her as a potential husband. If Takeko accepted, she’d be subject to her new husband and her name would probably have been lost to history. She refused and had to separate herself from her disgruntled master, becoming a martial arts instructor in her own right.

At the same time, Japan was rapidly changing. The Samurai had been in power for over 1000 years but their power was waning, as was Japan’s isolation from the west. It was an American, Commodore Matthew Perry, who used gunboat diplomacy to force the Shogun into a trade treaty in 1854. Once America had a foothold; Britain, France, and Russia followed. Many Samurai felt their country had been humiliated and rose against the Shogun, joining together under the banner of the Emperor, a relatively useless ruler based in Kyoto.

The Emperor’s Samurai had access to western weapons-rifles and canon-while the Shogun’s Samurai fought with the historical edged weapons. Not surprisingly, the Shogun’s Samurai were defeated and retreated north; Nakano Takeko and her sister Yuko among them.

The Shogun’s Samurai prepared for a last stand and a westerner, Henry Schnell, promised he could get them weapons. He intended to smuggle them through the port of Niigata but he was unsuccessful and ended up fleeing for his life. The Shogun’s Samurai were on their own.

Rumors spread about the Emperor’s fighters raping women and selling them into slavery but Takeko was determined not to commit suicide. She and her sister were determined to fight and other women rallied around them. They presented themselves at an Aizu outpost but the Samurai commander refused to allow them to fight as an official part of the domain’s army. Not to be refused, on the morning of October 10, 1868, Takeko Nakano leads 18 other women into battle.

They should have been cut down. The Emperor’s Samurai were armed with rifles, probably Spencer rifles; repeating rifles capable of 15 shots per minute. Instead, the order was given to take the women alive. This was a mistake. The opposing army was stunned at the women’s ferocity and none fought harder than Takeko. Despite her skill and ferocity, Nakano Takeko was killed. Her sister, Yuko, removed her head from the battlefield to prevent her from becoming an enemy trophy and managed to get it back to the family’s temple where the priest promised to bury Takeko with honor.

A memorial to Nakano Takeko has been erected and modern Japanese women train in the same fighting style Takeko would have learned. And yet, Nakano Takeko isn’t alone. While the traditional role of female Samurai was to defend castles, extinguish fires, tend wounded, and prepare ammunition, there were many who played vital roles on battlefields. And yet, most Samurai history revolves around men.

I have a book, Samurai: The code of the Warrior by Thomas Louis and Tommy Ito. This is hardly a comprehensive history of the Samurai and yet the only mention of female Samurai is:

Samurai girls did not receive formal education, but they were expected to run their husbands’ estate while they were away at war. They also received martial arts training, especially in the yari and naginata, and there are many examples of samurai women fighting alongside their husbands. The most famous samurai woman, Tomeo Gozen, lived during the Gempei Wars. She decapitated the enemy leader after he ripped her clothes, and she presented his head to her husband.

Why is there so little said of female Samurai’s contribution? According to the Smithsonian’s documentary, it would be shameful if the victorious outcome of a battle could, in any way, be attributed to women. Thus, glory and honor were reserved exclusively for male warriors. That is changing.

Archaeological evidence is finally showing the true magnitude of contributions of many women who fought with the same spirit as Nakano Takeko. Bones were discovered at Senbon Matsubara, site of a 1580 battle involving the Takeda Samurai. As the bones were unearthed and studied, forensic archaeologists were able to determine 30% of the fighting force were women. This discovery prompted the study of other battlefields and archaeologists were surprised to find the average held true: almost 30% of the Samurai fighting forces were women.

Nakano Takeko and her army were retroactively called the Women’s Army but their contribution recognized and history is beginning to recognize the many other women that sacrificed and died, equal to their male counterparts. The Samurai Warrior Queens.

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I never used to like non-fiction. Why waste my time? It was dry and boring; I’d much rather spend my time reading fiction. However, I quickly learned I would have to get over my dislike of non-fiction because I needed to do the research necessary to create a believable world in my novel. True, I encountered dry and boring tomes but I encountered many more brilliantly written books that made the ancient world come alive. I’ve been hooked ever since. I do most of my reading about the Ancient World-Rome, Egypt, Carthage-and am thrilled when I discover stories of women who defy the strictures of society. Women who made a name for themselves by living their lives on equal footing with men. Women like Hypsicratea, the Amazon who fought beside and loved Mithradates VI.

I’d encountered Mithradates in a couple of my Roman history books but never heard of Hypsicratea until I purchased Vicki Leon’s “The Joy of Sexus”. It was there I discovered Hypsicratea-or Hypsicrates, as Mithradates called her. I wanted to know more. Ms. Leon’s book led me to Adrienne Mayor’s “The Poison King”. I bought it and searched its pages for mention of this amazing woman.

Mithradates meets Hypsicratea after the Third Mithradatic War while recruiting soldiers in Armenia. She belongs to to one of the nomadic Eurasian tribes where both boys and girls were taught to ride, hunt, and make war. She’s most likely in her early thirties in 69 BC and is a proficient horsewoman, archer, and wielder of the javelin and battle-axe. Hypsicratea begins traveling with Mithradates as his groom, caring for his horses, but quickly becomes his personal attendant and lover and, quite believably, the love of his life.

She would be at his side when he faced Pompey in battle and is more than likely at his side when he is forced to flee Pompey’s moonlight attack and take refuge in Sinora, his fortified treasury on the border of Armenia. But then what?

Unfortunately, there is no historical account of Hypsicratea after the winter of 63 BC. Did she die when Mithradates crossed the Caucasus? The base of a marble statue unearthed by Russian Archeologists says no. She survived the crossing and was still with Mithradates when he reclaimed the Kingdom of the Bosporus. Yet she was not with Mithradates when he met his death in that same Kingdom. Where did she go? Did she survive?

There is plenty of fuel for speculation. There are historical references to a “Hypsicrates”, a historian who wrote about Pontus and the Black Sea. Is this Mithradates’ Hypsicrates, an amazing woman who would have little difficulty passing as a male? There just isn’t enough information to know for sure but that doesn’t make the story of Hypsicratea any less fascinating.

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I’ve never paid too much attention to American History. I’ve always been fascinated with Rome, Carthage, Egypt, and Parthia and Medieval England is the latest period I’ve spent any time with. Still, I’m a history buff and I was able to persuade my family to stop at the Anasazi and Fremont Indian State Parks during our trip to Utah. More on the Anasazi people later.

The Fremont Indian State Park was a fascinating place and I highly recommend stopping there if you ever get a chance. My family and I were the only visitors so I had the museum to myself. I was delighted to spend as much time with the exhibits as I liked without having to try and read over someone else’s head or dodge children. It was in the museum that the similarities between Ancient American and Ancient Egyptian Cultures first clicked in my mind. I was grinding corn with the mano and metate when I looked up to read the description of the artifacts. Whoever had written it had added that the Ancient Americans suffered from painful teeth due to bits of stone ending up on the grain. I’d read the exact same thing in Red Land, Black Land by Barbara Mertz and was struck by the similarity. I shrugged it off: of course there would be similarities between cultures, I told myself: there are only so many materials from which basic tools can be crafted. It makes sense both cultures would grind grain between two stones.

And yet…as I traveled through the outdoor exhibits and saw the cave paintings, I was struck again with how similar the two cultures are: similar and yet utterly unique. I thought perhaps it was merely human nature to wish to leave something behind; something carved into stone that tells future generations ‘I was here. I lived.’ Apparently, both the Ancient Egyptians and Ancient Americans felt the same way. I marked the similarities and went home.

Pictures of the Cave Paintings-you have to look close to see some of them

I admit I didn’t pay them much more thought until I was purchasing more books. I’d listed a few from the Fremont State Park library I wanted to read and, while I was searching for those titles, I found They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America by Ivan Van Sertima; a professor of Afro-American studies at Rutgers University. I was reading Jack Turner’s Spice at the time and was curious what Professor Van Sertima had to say about pre-Columbian visitors. I knew about a Viking presence but had never heard of an African presence before.

The entire book is fascinating. I can’t say enough good things about it. Get it. Read it. I wish I had time to discuss the entire book but I’ll limit myself to Chapters 7 through 9 because they reminded me of the sense of similarity between Egyptian and American cultures I’d felt at the Fremont Indian State Park.

Chapter Seven, titled Black Africa and Egypt, introduced me to the influence of racially black Africans on Egypt and how many of things I considered uniquely Egyptian-mummification, tomb painting, bird and animal deities-had their origins among Africans south and west of the Nile. Chapter Eight, titled The Black Kings of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, introduced me to Nubian Kings who liberated Egypt from Assyrian vassalage and ruled it for a century. Chapter Nine, titled African-Egyptian Presences in Ancient America, took me through the archaeological evidence that not only proves Africans had crossed the Atlantic and mingled with Ancient Americans, but that there are astonishing similarities between Ancient American and Ancient Egyptian cultures.

The North Equatorial current and counter current make travel between the African and American continents possible. Professor Van Sertima includes descriptions of experiments proving such travel and culture sharing was possible with the level of ship sophistication of the time, especially that of the Egyptians and Phoenicians. Travel and culture sharing happened across the Sahara and that culture sharing was carried across the Atlantic long before it was believed to be possible.

I found this absolutely fascinating. Of course the two cultures are unique but, arm-chair scholar that I am-I saw the similarities and was amazed to learn there is archaeological proof for culture sharing hundreds of years before Columbus. The culture sharing went both ways: I read it’s a bit more difficult to make the crossing from American to Africa but Professor Van Sertima shows examples of linguistic similarities that suggest an American influence in Northern Africa.

I never learned this in school. Public school classes are, by necessity, overviews of history and I get that but I think this African influence, the culture sharing across the Sahara, and the fact that there were great explorers who carried their culture across a vast ocean, is worth knowing. I look forward to studying more African history. And, my interest in American history has been piqued. I think seeing how these African-Egyptian influences were absorbed into and made unique by Olmec, Aztec, and Mayan cultures will be fascinating. I’m going to need more bookshelves.

These all came from the Cave of 100 Hands

I wonder what the squiggle means…

The Little Frog Man is a bit blurry-I couldn’t get closer

The Cave had to be barred because of vandals so I pushed my camera’s zoom capability to the limit